Stuff

Popping

Heart Eyes Emoji for Garbagemen

This month, we’d like to give a quick shout out to the people who pick up garbage in Xela. They know how to do their jobs and do them well — a quality that’s perhaps unique among the municipal workers of this fine city. What’s more, they work overtime throughout the month of September, when all of Guatemala comes to leave their trash in Parque Central. Keep up the good work!

Flopping

Flush the Muni Down the Drain

Xela’s got a couple of notoriously stinky street corners. This is thanks to the ancient and barely functional sewer system that runs beneath the cobblestone streets, which is perpetually clogged with cigarette butts and occasionally overflows with sewage like the river spirit at the bathhouse in Spirited Away It’s not the smell or the sewers that wedeem to be flopping this month. Nor is it whoever stole the metal manhole cover on the corner of 13 Avenida and 7a Calle — one of the stinkiest and busiest corners in the city center on a good day. Some enterprising soul covered the hole with a large piece of cardboard, which did little to mitigate the stench. The floppers are the geniuses at the Muni, who re-sealed the hole with a veritable mountain of concrete. Doesn’t that entirely defeat the purpose of having a removable cover for drain access? It calls to mind Xela Mayor Luis Grijalva’s plan for fixing potholes by filling them with dirt. The new concrete mound somehow also makes the sidewalk even harder to navigate safely. If you work in local government and you’re confused by these simple concepts, please drop us a line at xelawho@gmail.com for a little chat..